Niagara: A History of the Falls (19 page)

Two days later, his interest was further piqued by a note from the lady herself, suggesting that if he ever visited Buffalo he could return the handkerchief. Before he could seize that opportunity, Miss Montague appeared again at one of his performances accompanied by a woman she identified as her mother, who repeated the daughter’s invitation to call. The handkerchief, having apparently served its purpose, was forgotten.

Farini’s visit was temporarily sidetracked by the arrival of another young woman, a popular concert singer named Anna Bishop. Miss Bishop, through her agent, was insisting on riding across the gorge on the rope walker’s back. “I should like to be pointed out as a woman who risked her life in crossing the Falls on a man’s back,” was the way she put it. This blatant attempt at self-promotion put Farini off. When he discovered that she was also subject to fits of giddiness, he turned the offer down although, he said, he was “in want of a new sensation … to keep alive the interest of the public in my exploits.”

Now he was free to visit Miss Montague. The events that followed, as set down by the Great Farini himself, formed the perfect melodrama. He was, he says, received by “a very pretty and engaging young lady” who, in her sister Louisa’s absence, offered to entertain him. He looked about, observed that “the furniture indicated wealth and good taste, [and] the decorations though rich were not gaudy or ostentatious.” The sister’s conversation was refined “and had a tone of good breeding.” Her appearance suggested that she came from a good family, “but there was a look in her eyes which I did not like and something in her manner not quite in keeping with a well-bred young lady.”

He remarked that she herself bore no resemblance to her sister. “Do you think her better looking than I am?” she asked coquettishly, and plumped herself down on the sofa by his side, an action he thought decidedly overfamiliar. She too had been at the Falls, she told him, but he hadn’t seen her. “I was there with a gentleman, my friend.” Victorian conventions being what they were, this reply caused Farini to have doubts as to whether he was in a respectable house. The phrase “my friend,” he noted, was one “applied by women of a certain class to those who support them.” He asked whether the friend was a very liberal man, to which she replied, loudly, that it was none of his business. At that, he concluded, “there could be no mistake now concerning the profession of the woman at my side and the character of the house into which I had allowed myself to be invited.”

He rose to leave, asking that she tell her sister that he had come but could not stay. At that she gave a loud shriek. “Do your dirty work!” she cried. “I will not be insulted by any of that stuck-up Lillie’s fancy circus lovers.”

This astonishing turn of events sent Farini into the hall. There he was confronted by a strange man. “He has grossly insulted me, Jack,” cried the young woman, whereupon a brutal tussle ensued. While the men exchanged blows the girl struck Farini from behind with a blunt instrument. Nevertheless, he managed to knock Jack unconscious with a piece of iron and tried to get away by heaving a chair through the window.

Now another man named Mose and “a fiendish woman, Sarah,” joined the battle, apparently with the intention of robbing him. Kicking and clawing, the foursome kept up the struggle until Louisa Montague herself, accompanied by “the elderly female who passed for her mother,” arrived. At this point Farini felt his legs weaken, black spots danced before his eyes, and he passed out.

He woke up in bed in the home of a local jurist, Justice Spetszell, with whom he had spent his first night in Buffalo. A doctor and the comely Miss Montague were standing over him. They told him he had been unconscious for three days, but he was undoubtedly cheered to learn that his two male assailants were in hospital with broken limbs. His nurse was none other than Mrs. John Fulton, of the International Hotel at the Falls, who had rushed to his side on learning of his injuries. Her interest in the handsome daredevil was held by some to be more than motherly, but she brushed this gossip aside. “I am aware,” she declared, “that some evil disposed people have wilfully misconstrued the meaning of my intentions toward you, but while I know I have done right and my husband is satisfied, I do not fear the scandal of jealous, narrow-minded sycophants.… I am indifferent to the opinion of everybody, let them think what they like.…”

The meek but adoring presence of Miss Montague posed something of a problem until Farini introduced her to Mrs. Fulton as his “night nurse.” Mrs. Fulton was baffled at this, since Miss Montague seemed to have no other patients and was, apparently, working gratis. “Sometimes I take more interest in one patient than another,” she explained demurely.

“So your interest in this gentleman is not an ordinary one,” said the perceptive Mrs. Fulton.

“Yes,” came the reply. “It was ail my fault.” Then, as Farini put a finger to his lips, she became silent.

But Mrs. Fulton would not be put off and soon winkled out the story. “She has plenty of good in her,” she told Farini after the two women held a private tête-à-tête. “The poor thing was too confiding and was betrayed by a wolf in sheep’s clothing.… When I have gone, she will explain all.”

The explanation has all the heart-rending atmosphere of
East Lynne
, the Victorian novel that Mrs. Henry Wood was about to publish. “The terrible girl, who must have been the means of bringing the two scoundrels into the house, had not been there a month.… I lived there as a respectable married woman with a man who had promised to make me his wife but who never kept his word. For his sake I ran away from a happy home and kind parents and I believed his vows and protestations of love and attachment until a few days ago when I discovered that my lover, he for whom I sacrificed home, parents, reputation, and all that a woman should value most, was a married man with two children. It was on the same night that the perfidy of my destroyer was revealed to me that I returned home, only to find you nearly killed. Oh, it was horrible. My punishment seemed to come all at once and I went almost mad. But I must bear everything, the shame, the disgrace, the scorn, and the contempt while he the author of my misery holds his head high and is considered an honourable man.” At that she sobbed uncontrollably.

The entire story, reminiscent of the old music-hall favourite “She Was Poor but She Was Honest,” was as full of holes as a worn stocking, but Farini accepted it with great gallantry. He was able to report that some time later mother and daughter had been reconciled and that after returning home, “she married a man who really loved her and is now a happy wife and mother.”

After several more performances at the Falls, Farini moved on later that same year to neighbouring fairs and carnivals. His amorous adventures, however, were by no means over. At Springfield, Illinois, “the landlord’s daughter, who was a highly cultured young lady, somewhat of a blue stocking and a contributor to G.D. Printess’s Louisville
Journal
, fell in love with me. I was very much flattered and paid her considerable attention, but not being a covetous man, nor wishing to monopolize so much beauty and genius, I unselfishly left her to shed the bright rays of her talents on more deserving mortals.”

Or, at least, that was the way he told it.

4
The legacy of Niagara

Although he sometimes drew larger crowds and performed greater feats of daring – letting his taut rope go slack, for instance, so that it swayed alarmingly in the gusts – Farini never achieved the immortality that was Blondin’s.

Before Farini completed his series of bi-weekly performances at Niagara, the Prince of Wales arrived on September 15. The two rival funambulists laid plans to outdo each other with new and greater feats. But it was Blondin who got the attention. Of course Farini offered to take the prince across the gorge, riding in a wheelbarrow on the slack rope, and of course he was refused. In his autobiography he told how he performed before the royal party, dropping from a dangling rope and swimming to safety, then trotting across without the security of a balancing pole. But the press paid only cursory attention. Blondin, on the other hand, drew columns of print – the best part of a page in
The Times
of London.

When Blondin once again carried Harry Colcord across the gorge, and later made his way out onto the tightrope wearing stilts (a feat Farini did not duplicate), thousands came to watch the exhibition – and to gawk at the heavy-lidded heir to the throne. Blondin offered to carry the prince across on his back, and the prince again refused. “I will not endanger your life,” he said, “and I will not expose mine.” The reporter for
The Times
declared that “one thing is certain … if you do go to see Blondin, when he once begins his feats, you can never take your eyes off him, unless you shut them from a very sickness of terror, till he is safe back again on land.”

“Thank God it’s over,” said the prince when Blondin descended.

It was the Frenchman’s feats against which all future performances were measured and it was Blondin’s name and memory that provided the magic. Harry Leslie, who crossed the gorge in 1865, advertised himself as “the American Blondin.” Professor J.F. Jenkins, in 1871, was “the Canadian Blondin.” Signor Henry Bellini, in 1873, was “the Australian Blondin.” Marie Spelterina, in 1876, the only woman ever to attempt a rope crossing of the Niagara, was said to “out Blondin Blondin.” She crossed backwards, blindfolded, wearing peach baskets on her feet.

In spite of the apparent danger, none of the fifteen or more performers who crossed the gorge on the tightrope was killed unless one counts the unfortunate Stephen Peer, a Canadian assistant to Bellini, who in 1887, probably intoxicated after a late party, tried to walk out onto his employer’s three-quarter-inch cable wearing ordinary street shoes and immediately plunged to his death.

As time wore on and funambulism became almost commonplace, performers tried to outdo one another by narrowing the rope and increasing their speed. By 1893, after Clifford Calverly established a new record by running across on his cable in a fraction over two minutes and forty-five seconds, tightrope walking at the Falls had begun to pall. One man, Oscar Williams, tried to drum up business in 1910 by repeating Blondin’s performance. To his chagrin, only a small crowd turned out to watch him.

For Blondin, the triumph never ended. He performed all his Niagara stunts at the Crystal Palace in London before a huge backdrop of the Falls. He was showered with medals, gifts, money, and jewels. A Blondin March was composed in his honour. The press called him the King of the Tight Rope, the Lord of the Hempen Realm, the Emperor of Manila (a promotion from prince). He toured the globe, performing all his old feats, including that of cooking an omelet high above the heads of the applauding throng. He returned to America and performed them all over again, as women continued to gasp and strong men to turn pale. One young man challenged him to a contest on the high wire, but Blondin gently declined, remarking that he had justly won his prestige and could rightfully claim that he was the greatest performer in the world. He gave his final performance at the age of seventy-two and died the following year on February 28, 1897, of diabetes.

For Farini the Great, the tightrope was only an adventurous way station on a roller-coaster journey through life. During his long career he was many things – strong man, inventor, explorer, writer, painter, sculptor, horticulturist. Nor were his years free from tragedy. In 1862 he performed on the high rope at the Havana bull ring carrying on his back a female partner, identified in one report as his wife. In his unpublished autobiography he makes no mention of her or of the tragedy that followed; undoubtedly Farini did not care to evoke what must have been a dreadful experience. At the high point of the performance in Havana, the unfortunate woman made the grievous error of reaching back to wave at the crowd and toppled off the rope. Hanging by one foot, Farini seized her by the hem of her dress; but it tore away, and she fell headlong into the crowd. She died a few days later leaving a child, who, so the news services reported, was cared for by the women of Havana.

When the Civil War was in its second year, Farini’s uncle, who had enlisted in the Union army, asked his nephew to join his staff. Years later Farini told Charles Currelly, the curator of the Royal Ontario Museum, that he had volunteered for the secret service, gone south, and enlisted in the Confederate army. It was his function to ferret out military plans, desert, turn in his information, then head south again and join a different unit. He claimed later to have invented a method of transporting armed men across rivers using pontoons for shoes. The president himself, it is said, watched a demonstration. Farini liked to quote Lincoln’s remark at that time: “Young man, don’t be afraid, for if you should topple over and get in head down, I’m tall enough to wade you out.”

Farini returned to Niagara in 1864, and there he attempted another death-defying feat. He proposed to wade to the very lip of the American Falls wearing iron stilts especially made for the purpose. He succeeded in getting to a point in the shallows halfway between the Goat Island bridge and the brink of the cascade when one of the stilts broke and he found himself struggling in the rapids. With one leg badly injured as a result of his tumble, he managed to reach Robinson’s Island, a tiny, wooded bit of rock not far from the Luna Falls. There he sat, marooned and outwardly calm, massaging his injured limb, while a curious crowd gathered. No one attempted to rescue him because it was widely believed that Farini had concocted the entire accident. Hours passed before he was finally taken ashore.

His career in the decade that followed was peripatetic. He took his tightrope act again to Latin America, then in 1866 turned up in England with an adopted child, a young orphan boy he called El Niño. Was this the child his former partner had left in Havana in 1862? Certainly the two were inseparable for the rest of Farini’
s
life. (El Niño eventually married Farini’
s
younger sister.) Farini trained El Niño as a trapeze artist, and soon the Flying Farinis were dazzling spectators at the Cremorne Gardens and the Alhambra Palace in London, the nimble boy playing a snare drum high above the crowd as his adoptive father held him by the nape of the neck.